Population Research Institute claims new UNFPA video series refutes its critics

Front Royal, Va., Dec 11, 2008 / 06:13 am (CNA).- Following the Huffington Post’s recent attack on the Population Research Institute (PRI) for opposing policies of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), PRI challenged its critics to examine its evidence linking the organization with coercive population control programs in China.

Cristina Page, writing in a December 2 essay at the Huffington Post, claimed that the PRI was coordinating the “heckling of humanitarian relief efforts” conducted by the UNFPA. Page claimed that “UNFPA was working with the Chinese government to prove that voluntary family planning would lead to better outcomes for Chinese citizens as well as the Chinese government.”

She claimed that the UNFPA was actually persuading the Chinese government to relax its “coercive and brutal one-child policy.”

“Bush, eager to lock lips with his fanatical base, ignored the advice of his own state department, as well as many allied nations, and opted to go with the swirly eyed lunacy of the six staffers of PRI,” Page charged. “At their request, Bush quickly froze all U.S. funds to UNFPA, which represented 12 percent of its budget.”

In a statement from PRI, Steven Mosher and Colin Mason noted that the Huffington Post attack should draw attention to PRI’s new video series about its investigation into UNFPA activities.

PRI argued that Page had good timing but “got virtually everything else wrong.”

“PRI brought back hard evidence of coercion in China--videotapes, cassette tapes, written and spoken testimony from dozens of witnesses the details, all of which is easily accessed on our web site.

“Not only does TheHuffington Post not address this evidence, Cristina Page does not even seem to be aware of its existence,” the PRI statement said.

PRI also responded to the claim that President Bush wanted to "lock lips with his fanatical base” by insisting that it was then-Secretary of State Colin Powell who decided to send his own investigative team into China after reviewing PRI evidence.

“When they reaffirmed our findings, only then did he--not Bush--decide to discontinue funding the UNFPA. Colin Powell, who is both pro-abortion and pro-population control, has never shown the slightest inclination to want to lock lips with Bush's supposedly ‘fanatical base’."

“TheHuffington Post has no real arguments to make, and so it resorts to sandlot slurs,” the PRI statement concluded, adding that Page had not tried to contact PRI for her story.